Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Two of my fingernails are coming detached and since the two doctors in my life are currently both in the States I was reduced to googling my situation, i.e. "fingernails falling off". The internet told me that I had come into close contact with levels of high radiation. Since it is never dark out here these days I do not know if I glow in the dark or not. And I am not the proud owner of a Geiger counter. I am sure my diagnosis would have been less impressive or exagerrated had it been provided by an actual doctors, not one made up of bytes.﻿

I sometimes
find that wine descriptions have the opposite effect on me than what the taster
intended. I do not want to drink a liquid “reminiscent of buttercups with a
whisper of fresh soil and a gun-metal aroma”. Often the words selected are way over
the over the top and either intended to increase the price of the bottle or to
establish the taster as a serious connoisseur with super-human taste buds and outlandish
smelling apparatus. I recently came across a very funny one from an amateur
member of a tasting group. It read: Like a donkey defecating into a vat
of blue cheese. Another one that made me smile was meant to descibe an over
oaked red: Chateau Two by Four. Another inteded for the same read: A wine only
a termite could love. After seeing this I really want to orgainse a group to take
a wine tasting class with the sub-intention of competing amongst ourselves for
the evening‘s most ridiculous description.

But this purple
prose is catching on for other beverages, at least here in Iceland. Coffee is
now branded in the same way and the writers of these descriptions are just as superfluous
as the wine guys. Last week such a decal made the news here as an inside joke
in the coffee packaging factory accidentally went out to market. It read: The coffee is full bodied, lively yet low in
acidity and has a lightly spiced enchanting tang. If you wish to be sodomized
phone Gummi B. Not really along the saccharine line set out at the
beginning.

This
newsflash about the dirty coffee is typical of what is in the papers these last
couple of weeks. There is nothing going on as everyone is on vacation. On
Saturday the weather office had predicted a storm and due to the lack of things
to report this was blown out of all proportion, no pun intended. Everyone in Iceland
was asked to walk around their homes and remove any loose items that the wind
might pick up and owners of trampolines were given special warning. My husband
and I did an inspection and secured everything in sight and even bid farewell
to all of the plants we have recently planted in our new flower beds. We were
certain that on the Sunday morning they would be stems at best.

But nothing
happened. You would not even have been able to fly a kite it was so calm. The
following day the news started backtracking. We had interviews with meteorologists
that said the weather had been absolutely crazy at 1000 m height. And there was
a report of a man being blown over on a campground on the south coast.

But I guess
a no-show storm beats one that does make an appearance. Just as no news is good
news.

7 comments:

Yrsa, only you could start a post with radiation poisoning and make me laugh out loud!! I once read an assessment of the South African red wine, Pinotage, that said it tasted like burning tires. I wondered how that critic knew what burning tires taste like.

Annamaria - I was actually thinking of you when I wrote about wanting to go to a wine tasting and make up wierd descriptions. It was the lymrick competition that jumped to mind. A lymrick wine description would win for sure.

Annamaria, maybe the wine critic was a victim of necklacing - the horrible practice of throwing old tyres over a person, drenching them in petrol, and setting fire to them. Ghastly. I prefer to think of pinotage (at least bad pinotage) tasting like bananas. Yrsa, I guess you don't get bottomless cups of coffee in Iceland.

Yikes, Stan, not even the most pretentious wine critic deserves such awful violence. Yrsa, I am working on wine tasting language limericks. Here is what I have so far:Love and wine made the girl's head feel spin-ish.Talk of both brought expressions quite grin-ish.Was it the man in her bedOr a large glass of redThat had great legs and a very long finish.

Sigurdardottir, you've done it again. You created a party atmosphere (just with words, no sheep's head) that has Annamaria limericking and Stan on fire! You've also helped me overcome a lifetime addiction: your (hysterical) piece has convinced me it's finally time to just say "no" to gummy bears.